Bugs on the menu

Crawlies vs Livestock: How much can you eat?
In this comparative table of the edible percentages of meat for each animal, it's clear that insects produce less waste - we throw away three-quarters of a chicken, but can eat the same percentage of a locust.
Insects also win on the "conversion factor" or ratio of feed ingested by the animal to the meat produced by it - known as ECI. Beef cattle has an ECI rate of ten; the cockroach triumphs with 44.

Joe McKendry

This article was taken from the May 2011 issue of Wired
magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before
they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional
content bysubscribing
online.

What's for lunch? "Most likely it will be quiche with meal-worms
and locusts. But a couple of weeks ago we had chocolates with
locusts on them..." Marcel Dicke, entomologist and entomophage.

This is the culinary feast being planned by Marcel Dicke. It's a
regular -- though not necessarily welcome -- accompaniment to his
talks, one of which is scheduled for the end of the week. "We'll
have all kinds of small snacks and different things," he adds. It's
mid-February, and the 53-year-old entomologist is due to speak at
Amsterdam Zoo, where he will try to persuade the audience that
eating insects
isn't just a good idea, it's inevitable. "For every human on
Earth," he tells wired, "there are between 200kg and 2,000kg of
insect biomass -- two tonnes of life that we often crush, avoid or
poison. People think that there are a few bugs and we should just
get rid of them. But there aren't a few, there are many. And we're
not being bugged by them -- we really are dependent upon them.
Without insects, there's no life on Earth.

"Insects are at the beginning of the food chain," says Dicke.
"They serve as food for birds and small rodents. Then they also
pollinate, they clean, they generate and produce wealth. In the US
alone, in 2006, the unnoticed labouring of insects generated $57
billion for the country. In the same year, the Iraq war cost $80 billion. It is the silent contribution of ants, bees,
grasshoppers, crickets and larvae to our economy."

Dicke will finish his presentation as he normally does, with a
food trolley being rolled on stage. The snacks laden on it change
according to location ("I have suppliers in the Netherlands -- the
insects we have available are meal-worms, crickets and locusts").
"In the Netherlands, the general public is used to the idea," Dicke
says. "When I gave a TED talk in Oxford [July 2010], people were
more reluctant." The trolley bore glazed locusts and tiny larvae
that resembled ground hazelnuts. "The audience would um and ah for
15 minutes before they took a bite. In Russia, it's even
worse. I'm trying to get across that these are delicacies. And
anyway, you already eat 500g of insects every year." Dicke is
confident that his Sunday audience will come back for seconds.

"I began to realise that we were misusing a lot of our precious
land," Dutch agronomist Marian Peters says. "My job was to manage
state-backed local-development projects in the field of sustainable
agriculture. I observed the countryside around me and thought about
the best way to use these public funds. I realised I was quite good
at managing resources and getting them to those who needed them the
most. One day, by chance, a chicken farmer told me about this guy
who worked with insects. He explained: 'He breeds locusts and
larvae, and the process is so controlled that you can even eat
them.' Later, I discovered that there was also a restaurant in the
area, which had introduced a few edible insects on its menu. A
light went off in my brain: 'Why not?' I asked myself."